


Flowering

by Farla



Category: Homestuck
Genre: First Period, Gen, btp, rbtf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 17:41:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farla/pseuds/Farla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's not going to be playing the expected role of the naïve child who thinks she's bleeding to death and runs to her mother to be laughed at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flowering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anonymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymonster/gifts).



Rose gets her first period when she's eleven years old, around noon.

She takes it in stride. Her mother has peppered the house with informative, cheerful books about growing up and puberty since around the time she was capable of reading, as well as a number of medical textbooks with extremely numerous and large pictures of what STDs do to the human body. She's not going to be playing the expected role of the naïve child who thinks she's bleeding to death and runs to her mother to be laughed at. Eleven is younger than she expected, but she knows it's well within expected variation. There aren't any pads and she doesn't want to mess around with tampons for what she knows will just be some light spotting, so she wads up some toilet paper and goes on with her day. She expects that after a few months she'll need to tell her mother, but she's at least going to avoid any mocking first period parties.

Her midsection feels a little achy, which she puts down as the cramps she's read about. She doesn't bother taking any painkillers.

Rose can't believe people make such a fuss about this.

The next morning, it feels like someone's stabbed knives into her stomach, or maybe that she should try stabbing knives in - it can't possibly make it feel worse. She pulls back the covers and finds her pajamas and bed look like they belong in a horror film. She didn't know there was that much in her.

Menstrual blood, Rose recites to herself, or more accurately menstrual fluid, is primarily composed of uterine lining, which happens to be a similar dark red color to blood. There is some very slight actual blood loss, around the order of a teaspoon - or was it tablespoon? - during the course of a full cycle. It is referred to as bleeding simply because it shares visual similarities. It is not really blood on her bed. It is a perfectly natural process and she is not dying.

She yanks the covers back over when she hears footsteps.

"Are you feeling okay?" her mother asks with her usual sickening mockery.

Rose fakes a cough. She doesn't have to fake the rest of it. "I feel a little under the weather," she says. "Headache." She accepts the aspirin her mother offers.

Luckily, her mother's never been much interested in actual, unironic housework, so it isn't too hard to sneak her bloodied sheets and pajamas to the washing machine and run it without alerting her. She ducks into the bathroom for more painkillers - the aspirin doesn't seem to have done anything - and layers more paper in her underwear.

She gets back to her room just in time to pretend she hasn't moved when her mother appears to force actual authentic chicken soup on her. There is a piece of parsley floating on it.

Rose intends to get back at this by pretending to enjoy it and complimenting her mother on how her concern is matched only by her cooking ability, but her stomach rolls and she can barely manage to eat a third of it. Adding insult to injury, her mother immediately dashes off to produce some sort of sweet gingery drink promised to settle her stomach. Rose grits her teeth and sips at the delicious concoction until her mother is satisfied and leaves.

Her period will be over soon. This is just her first one, and she can't imagine there's much left after how much was on the sheets. She'll probably be fine in an hour or two.

In an hour and a half, she's back in the bathroom, rereading the suggested dosage on the pill bottle and wondering how bad liver failure would actually be. She's sure her mother's is in no condition to donate, so she'd be spared that, and perhaps the weeks of mocking attentiveness, hospitalization and possible death would be worth it. The surgery at least can't be worse than this.

Her planning is interrupted by a sudden wave of nausea and she rushes to double over at the toilet. Then she keeps vomiting, or at least trying to despite the fact her stomach is quite demonstratively empty. After ten minutes, it seems over, and she stumbles back to bed. She lies there wondering how much of the pills were in her stomach at the time, and if that means the total amount in her bloodstream is lower than it would be and she can take more.

GG: are you sure you shouldn't tell your mom???? :(   
GT: are you sure you shouldn't tell your mom?   
TG: yeah telling your mom would be such a chump move youre really showing her now  
TG: you are the misery winner its you

Then he draws a comic of what's probably her vomiting a fountain of blood while saying _my death will be my ultimate victory mother_ because Strider is as subtle as he is confused about what menstruation actually entails.

She's not sure why she even told Dave. She's even less sure why she feels tears forming in her eyes. She's frustrated, certainly, but hardly that frustrated. With the sense of clinical detachment, she tries to examine her emotions and keeps coming up with the same result: she is somewhat upset and she is crying like today is the worst day of her life.

Is this the fabled hormones? But no, those are supposed to make her irrational, not trigger waterworks while she sits in bafflement. Perhaps she's just gone insane.

Three a.m. the next morning, her mother catches her kneeling in the bathroom while she's abandoned trying to throw up the contents of her stomach and moved on doing her best to throw up the organ itself.

Rose may not be capable of standing up at the moment, but she won't go down without a fight. She manages to get out a quite eloquent explanation that she simply hadn't wanted to bother her mother with something so trivial, marred only by the fact she's cut off by the need to retch bile into the toilet.

Her mother says a lot of things along the lines of it being absolutely no trouble. Normally Rose is good at noticing the exact words used and the subtle pauses between them, navigating her passive-aggressive jibes to the true meaning hidden between the lines, but she keeps fading in and out of the conversation. Her mother directs her back to bed and leaves with some promise Rose doesn't really pay attention to.

She closes her eyes miserably. Her mother's probably already calling doctors down. When she opens her eyes next, it'll be to a ring of strange heads peering down at her like she's some interesting specimen. Probably at home, unless her mother thinks the drama of sending her to a hospital outweighs the ostentatious of dragging doctors to the middle of nowhere.

When she opens her eyes again, the ceiling above is still her ceiling (it's pretty distinctive - her mother commissioned a wizard mural for her last half birthday) and far more surprising, there's no one around except the mighty Zazzerban and his astounding beard with the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck in it.

Her mother pokes her head in to offer a some sort of chemical heater and a surely false assurance that this will do the trick. She promises to return in a half hour with more soup.

Rose has rallied by then. She sits up when her mother arrives to to thank her lavishly for the heater and then takes the proffered bowl of soup, spurning the offer of a martini that comes with it with practiced ease.

Her mother, however, is not satisfied. She wants to know about how Rose is taking her amazing transition into womanhood.

_Oh Mother_ , thinks Rose. _Two can play this game._

She feels so terrible about being such a bother over this minor little thing, she tells her mother. She seems better already and supposes it'll be over soon, though. How long does it usually last, three days...?

"Oh Rose," her mother says with the most nauseatingly condoling tone as she sat on the side of Rose's bed, "dear, I never told you about my own first period, did I?"

Rose assures her that this is fine. "I fully understands that anecdotes are hardly the same as data, Mother," she says.

Her mother assures her back that they can be enlightening anyway and launches into a monologue on the marvels of genetic determination. "And as you share precisely half of my DNA," she finishes, (Rose had never found the right way to ask why her mother had bothered with the genetic testing to verify this, or figured out why she always sounded so smug when she brought it up), "it follows naturally" -her mother seems on the verge of bursting into giggles, clearly she's already quite a few martinis into the day- "that you'll also share some physical traits."

"Of course Mother, I am well aware of basic biology. Offspring share traits with their genetic donors."

"Naturally"-definitely suppressing giggles now. One day Rose will stop making a fool of herself in front of her mother for reasons she can't understand-"I can't say what the other half of your DNA is inclined toward, but it's presumably somewhere in the middle of the bell curve."

"Presumably," Rose agrees with a sinking feeling.

Her mother explains that her own first period, involving intense bleeding, took nearly two weeks. By the seventh day she was getting quite nervous. "Of course I'm sure you'd have handled it more calmly," she says with the most sincere tones of insincerity imaginable, "as you're so amazingly level-headed."

"Are they always that long?" Rose blurts out.

"Oh, no, it was just the first one," her mother says. Rose cursed herself inwardly. Of course, why else would her mother have specified that. She must not be back to her usual self yet, that was an amateur mistake. "And I haven't had to deal with them at all since getting that implant. Which reminds me, darling, we haven't had a talk about birth control."


End file.
